This invention relates to protective athletic equipment, and more specifically to a pneumatic guard for preventing injuries to players participating in contact sports.
Anyone who has ever played or watched the games of football, hockey, or any other body contact sport is aware of the heavy body contact involved and the resulting danger of injury to players. Since the early days of these contact sports, injuries have occurred all too frequently. Unfortunately, improved protective equipment items have often become available only after many serious injuries or even fatalities have occurred, and such protective items have usually not been completely effective in preventing injuries. For example, in football, substantial improvements have taken place over the years in the design of protective gear such as helmets and shoulder pads, but such improvements have not completely eliminated head and shoulder injuries. As a result of this continuing occurrence of injuries, manufacturers have been constantly pressured to design new and better protective athletic equipment.
In the design of any item of protective equipment, the primary goal is to protect the wearer against injury, or against aggravation of a previously incurred injury. Such a protective item allows a player to play to his full potential without fear of injury, or without fear of magnifying an existing injury. However, it is also desirable that no protective equipment item be usable by the wearer to inflict injury upon another player. For this reason, many organized athletic leagues have formed committees for establishing rules to govern equipment specifications and to ban those equipment items which might be dangerous.
The effect of equipment regulations is particularly noticeable in the games of football and hockey wherein a player is required to use his hands, arms, and legs to push or block an opponent. As a result, players are regularly subjected to painful and sometimes serious arm and leg bruises. Naturally, the use of protective equipment is encouraged, but many otherwise effective protective items are banned from use by equipment regulations because of their probable utility as weapons against an opposing player. For example, rules promulgated by a National Collegiate Athletic Association (N.C.A.A.) football committee expressly forbid the use of any hard or unyielding materials on a player's elbow, forearm, wrist, or hand because of the danger of injury to other players. Even tape and bandage is disallowed unless used for protecting existing injuries, and only after inspection and approval by a game official. Moreover, N.C.A.A. football rules prevent hard or unyielding materials from being used on a player's legs unless such materials are completely embedded within some type of relatively rigid padding.
As a result of equipment regulations, the development of hand and arm pads, elbow pads, thigh guards, knee pads, and the like has been extremely slow. Arm pads and the like have essentially been limited to soft sponge-like pads held by elastic wrapping next to the body area needing protection. See U.S. Pat. No. 3,073,209. Such sponge paddings partially absorb blows and pad the protected area, but they are not highly effective in distributing blows over a large area and thereby do not satisfactorily reduce the effects of the blows. Thigh pads and knee pads have been essentially restricted to slow recovery foam pads which offer only moderate protection against sharp blows. These slow recovery foam pads sometimes have a rigid shield encased therein for added protection, but such reinforced pads can be undesirably jolted against a player's leg to possibly cause an injury or aggravate an existing one. Accordingly, existing equipment has fallen far short of fulfilling the need for arm and leg protection. The unfortunate result is a continuance of arm and leg bumps and bruises which are often severe enough to warrant at least temporary removal of a player from competition.
Over the years, a wide variety of pneumatic devices has been proposed in an attempt to improve upon protective paddings. These pneumatic devices typically comprise an inflatable bag for use with some other item of protective equipment. For example, inflatable pneumatic devices have been suggested for use with football helmets in U.S. Pat. No. 2,150,290, and with shoulder pads in U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,757,019 and 2,247,961. Other inflatable devices such as thigh guards and pads for protecting injured areas have also been proposed. See U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,247,961 and 2,663,020. All of these prior art pneumatic devices, however, are directed to a bag having a valve to permit inflation. This valve undesirably provides a rigid or semirigid lump which, upon receipt of a blow, can be sharply driven against the supposedly protected area covered by the bag. The valve can penetrate into the protected area and cause painful aggravation of an existing injury, or even cause new injuries. Moreover, the valve as well as any seams in the pneumatic bag is often relatively weaker than the rest of the bag, and can fail upon a sharp blow to cause the bag to lose air and become ineffective. Because of these deficiencies, these previously available pneumatic devices have seldom been used by players, and accordingly, have not significantly improved upon protective paddings or reduced the occurrence of injuries.
The present invention overcomes the deficiencies of previously available protective paddings by providing a substantially improved pneumatic guard for protecting a wearer against injury. The present invention provides such an improved protective guard which complies with all equipment safety regulations, which is easy to wear without adding substantially to the weight or bulkiness of a player's equipment, and is both structurally simple and relatively inexpensive to manufacture.